Why There Could — and Should — be ‘FREE’ Lunch

Jarl Jensen | April 15, 2019

There’s an old saying, ‘There’s no free lunch’.

The expression is supposed to mean that people have to earn a living — nothing comes for free. There is an ethical truth to this statement. We can’t expect to get what we want out of life by being couch potatoes and not working for it.

However, it’s not true from an engineering and science perspective. Engineers and scientists create ‘FREE’ things all the time.

Take the example of energy consumption.

It used to cost $15 for a unit of energy (BTU). Today, it costs less than half that. We are essentially getting a ‘FREE’ unit of energy for every BTU we buy compared with what we received 50 years ago.

We can thank scientists and engineers for making energy production more efficient. Efficiency gains turn into lower costs for the same output. Those gains are seen in all industries for all products.

Energy is produced through work.

A turbine is turned through the combustion of fuel.

As the turbine is turned it produces electricity.

The efficiency gains of that process lead to lower electric bills.

This means the consumer is getting ‘FREE’ electricity as efficiency gains are put in place.

The key point is that work produces more for less — this is also called productivity gain.

Why Should We Get “FREE” Lunch

People work for a living, yet their work is not producing anything “FREE” for them. People are working just as hard, and for just as many hours, as they did 50 years ago. They are still not able to buy more with their money.

In other words, the work people are doing is not translating into making more money. Meanwhile, a power company is doing the opposite by producing more power with less work.

The real question — “Why are people not making more money for their work just like how power companies are producing more power with the same amount of work?”

People should be benefiting monetarily from more efficient work. There ‘should’ be a ‘FREE’ lunch for the workers of the world but they’re not getting it.

Where Is The “Free” Lunch?

Now that we can see why there should be a ‘FREE’ lunch, let’s explore why there isn’t one. To understand that we have to first understand what the economy is.

The economy is a system of borrowing and spending.

People leverage assets to borrow money from banks.

Banks get money from the Federal Reserve and by recirculating money that has already been borrowed from the Fed.

The problem with this economic system is that it is based on the lending decisions of banks. This makes our economic system unlike anything else in the natural world — it makes it unscientific and unpredictable.

Because it is unscientific, it can not be engineered. It can not be engineered for workers to get there overdue ‘FREE’ lunch.

“FREE” Lunch Could be Engineered…

By “free” lunch, I really mean higher pay and a lower cost of living. The key to engineering the economy is to control the inputs into our financial system.

Those inputs are currently controlled by the monetary policy guidelines established by the Federal Reserve. Today, the Federal Reserve is not mandated to increase wages — in fact they are mandated to control inflation, which is the opposite of workers earning more money.

The cost of living keeps going up because the Federal Reserve is mandated to keep the banking system healthy by issuing more loans. These loans drive up the cost of living.